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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BirdDog who wrote (40449)	3/15/2001 11:35:14 AM
From: saukriver	Respond to of 54805

At the risk of being redundant. May I remind you that INTC is being a nice Gorilla. The Feds had threatened (twice) to blow this Gorilla right out of his tree. License agreements are highly motivated by this Fed. threat. All actions of this Gorilla are now highly motivated by the Fed. threat. Intel's license to AMD was at IBM's insistence, not any federal threat. Since at least January 20 (if not the SC decision in Gore v. Bush), the federal threat has waned substantially, even for MSFT. Your statement presupposes that a licensor has a duty to give licenses to all comers. That is wrong. Bristol litigated that point with MSFT. It won $1 million and some attys' fees for MSFT conduct, but it gained no license from MSFT. Even for MSFT, there is not much of an overarching duty to deal with another. Rambus and I believe Gemstar have said that those that challenge their patents and lose will not get licenses. A number of times, people has said that Rambus or GMST will be required to give a license. Not so. If MSFT had no duty to deal with Bristol, I don't see how others can be compelled to grant a license. (Rambus' threat of not giving a license to those that lose patent litigation against it may be hollow in light of the Markman hearing ruling limiting the scope of its patents. electronicnews.com The upshot of Bristol (and maybe the Rambus-Infineon litigation) is a licensor must play fair, but it has not duty to grant a license. In any event, the threat to Intel was from IBM, not USA. saukrive